Craving Lamb Chops? Read This First

<a href="http://www.freefoto.com/preview/09-24-3/Beef-Burger">FreePhoto.com</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


If your dietary goals include making as much of a mess as possible, I have a recipe for you.

First, devote huge swaths of the nation’s best farmland to grains and beans in monocrops. Drench them in petrochemical-based fertilizers and poisons, much of which will run off into groundwater. Then, instead of eating the resulting mountains of grains and beans—that would be far too efficient—feed them to animals.

To ensure that you’re creating as overwhelming a waste problem as possible, concentrate them by the thousands into vast pens and cages. Keeping them alive and growing in such cramped, unsanitary conditions will require staggering loads of antibiotics, thus providing an excellent breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

 OK, now run those animals through factory-scale slaughterhouses. Slaughtering them at such scale will require unthinkable amounts of clean water, and ensure a gusher wastewater teaming with dangerous nitrates and other poisons. Ship the resulting meat across the country in refrigerated trucks. Still hungry? Cook some industrial meat—or let a fast-food chain do so for you. Bonus: Focus on species that would otherwise turn something humans can’t digest—grass—into meat. Cows fit the bill—in fact, grain diets make them sick, requiring more pharmaceuticals to keep them alive until slaughter.

That, in a nutshell, is the story told by Environmental Working Group’s Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change and Health. Everyone who eats industrially produced meat should read it. Below is a teaser. Lamb is our most carbon-intensive foodstuff, EWG reports, but Americans barely eat any lamb. We do eat lots and lots of beef, though, and that habit contributes mightily to climate change. Note that cheese ranks third—kind of tragic, given that the USDA is working with the food industry to get more cheese into fast-food items. 

Big Mac Attack: Changing the climate one burger at a time. Big Mac Attack: Changing the climate one burger at a time.

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate